Roth McElvain

I own and operate McElvain Farms LLC. We have about 750 acres row cropped with corn and soybeans and anywhere from usually about 40 head of cattle and five or six sows. We’ve also got a tire business and a construction business. My dad is of that generation where if he’s not busy, he feels lazy.

I went through the Missouri Agricultural Leadership of Tomorrow (ALOT) program back in 2019, which was a two-year program that turned into a four-year program because of COVID. I really enjoyed that. And then I went through the Missouri Soybeans leadership fellowship last year. That really got me interested in the policy side of things. I’m a member of Missouri Soybeans, Missouri Corn, Missouri Farm Bureau, and kind of all the trade organizations. I also sit on the local Lewis and Marion County Cattlemen’s Board.

Growing up, my parents worked full-time and they were busy, so I didn’t even do 4-H. FFA came around in high school, so I joined that and was eventually the president of that. But FFA probably didn’t shape me as much as maybe other people did. In high school, I was farming and that’s what my job was. So the ALOT program really kind of kicked off the ag advocacy side and realizing that farming is different than what it used to be. You can have people who don’t even have a slight connection to the agriculture industry. So that’s when I started realizing that it was good for me to actually get out and about and join these great organizations.

If I had the money, they’d be Fendt green. But I don’t have the money, so they’re blue.

Usually black, hot or cold. But every now and then I’ll get a peanut butter flavored coffee.

I usually don’t eat snacks. But if I’m hauling a load of grain to the elevator, I will stop at a Casey’s and grab a piece of pizza.

I enjoy listening to the Clark Howard podcast. I’m very big into the financial stuff. And anything but bro-country music, honestly. I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s with hip and pop music.

When I was a kid, we ran a little gleaner F combine. And so there’s a little snoopy chair, and that was my chair in the combine. Mom and Dad worked full-time off the farm, so we’d shell corn late at night. I just remember sitting in that snoopy chair, watching the corn come in. And even at a young age I was kind of calculating bushels per acre. The most fun thing was we’d pull the handle up to dump the combine into the truck.
So now we’ve got the snoopy chair in that combine and my kids ride in it. It’s a little sentimental, just to see it passed through generations.

It’s not necessarily one person, but I look towards my parents. And my wife’s a big part of this. But also my grandparents, and I look at the generations before me and the sacrifice that they made. And whether it be family or not, but I always try to appreciate the sacrifice of the previous generation made for me to get to where I am, or anywhere my age. I realize that I won’t have to make as big sacrifices in my life because of what they did before me.

We’re 100% no-till. And that really started out of necessity because my parents didn’t have time to work ground since they were working all day. So dad really started that back, probably around ’95 or ’96 is when he started tinkering with it. Because I can remember being eight years old and our planter marker isn’t able to leave a mark in the ground. So we had these chains, like off the front of our tractor and we had to line that up with the last pass.

Also, with part of the no-till we also don’t use ammonia. We use a liquid system. It’s just not a practice that we find beneficial for us.

We really enjoy limited cover cropping. We enjoy being able to run cattle on the cover crop, which I guess kind of doesn’t make it a cover crop, but it is still holding soil in place and the cows are cycling the nutrients. To see all these different part of agriculture- the livestock and the row crops- come together in this one field, and have a green field of rye with cows and calves instead of bare dirt in the spring, it’s very cool to see.